Maternal, newborn and child health is an important focus of ClickDiagnostics’ projects. In our partnership with BRAC Manoshi, we designed a mHealth system specifically for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health. We worked to reengineer BRAC’s MNCH program by integrating Click’s mHealth model and equipping female community health workers (CHWs) with mobile phones.

ClickDiagnostics first listened to women in slums and rural areas in our extensive preliminary system studies and learned that women have demands for proper healthcare and are willing to pay for it if they were accessible and affordable, if had they not been already paying to local quack doctors and expensive private hospitals. ClickDiagnostics identified the following three major bottlenecks in the current healthcare system women suffer from — low quality, burden of cost, and lack of timely intervention. The distance from a nearest hospital facility correlates with cost of transportation, therefore with the level of women’s health awareness.

ClickDiagnostics identifies these bottlenecks in existing MNCH system, and then reengineers the system by mobilizing community health workers empowered with simple mobile phones. Through this direct channel to women, we are able to centralize patient data information in real time and prioritize treatments for high-risk pregnancies for example. Early intervention and emergency treatment for complications in delivery is possible through remote consultation from stationed doctors. We are also developing health education materials for women to be delivered through CHWs’ mobile phones. To carefully handle the sensitivity of women’s health concerns, we have trained and deployed female CHWs who are from the local communities.

ClickDiagnostics is an advocate of powerful stories that come out of improvements in women’s health. We believe that women are change leverage and an important indicator of their families’, communities’, and countries’ health.

We will share more stories of maternal and child health from the project grounds in the future!

In this photo: A mother and her child at ClickDiagnostics’ pilot project site in the peri-urban area of Dhaka district, Bangladesh.